Bennito L. Kelty
Audio By Carbonatix
Shortly after Mike Johnston took office as mayor of Denver in July 2023, he launched All In Mile High, an initiative to solve homelessness that borrowed a few ideas from Urban Peak, the Denver nonprofit that has been serving homeless youth in the metro area since 1988. And the city’s services continue to follow Urban Peak’s lead.
“Urban Peak is having an influence at the city level,” says Christina Carlson, the executive director of Urban Peak since 2017. “We can solve [homelessness] tomorrow if we rally together to make change. I really believe that.”
Urban Peak, which serves homeless individuals between the ages twelve to 24, has long offered temporary housing to get people off the street. Temporary housing for people swept out of encampments was Johnston’s biggest AIMH investment, with more than $130 million worth of contracts for nonprofits to operate hotels converted to shelters inked in his first year.
Urban Peak, which now operates out of its “Mothership” campus on 1630 South Acoma Street, offers supportive services to help the youth it shelters find permanent housing, work and benefits like housing vouchers. “What we’ve really doubled down on with the Mothership is that full-continuum of services,” Carlson says. “At Urban Peak, where we do outreach and transitional housing and permanent housing, we have built underneath it all the support services from medical to clinical to case management to education to workforce development. By creating that holistic approach, it’s way more effective.”
At the city’s AIMH housing sites, residents can access wraparound case management for behavioral and mental health as well as help transitioning into permanent housing and finding work or benefits like housing vouchers.
And just as Johnston’s AIMH has dealt with controversy over poor security, high costs, crime at its sites and the departure of the Salvation Army from management of several facilities, Urban Peak had to pay $2 million after the Denver Auditor found it committed wage theft during the construction of its Mothership. Carlson says that those back wages — which Urban Peak blamed on contractual confusion — are paid off.
Urban Peak separates temporary housing residents into “affinity groups,” meaning their roommates have similar backgrounds,like coming from foster care or identifying as LGBTQ. “There’s work that happens with seniors or families or male or female identifying, but I think teasing it out into smaller communities is new,” Carlson says. “Urban Peak was a big player in creating that.”
AIMH, too, separates some groups, putting homeless families at the Tamarac Shelter, 7525 Hampden Avenue, and women and trans residents in the Elati Village, at 1375 Elati Street.
Johnston promised to solve Denver homelessness by the end of his first term, which wraps up by 2027, and with a year and half left to go, he’ll likely rely on Carlson beyond her work at Urban Peak.
Just before the COVID pandemic in 2020, Carlson started the Homeless Leadership Council to unite the executives of the Denver area’s largest homelessness service providers, including officials from the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, the Denver Rescue Mission, Catholic Charities of Denver and Volunteers of America Colorado.
“It’s a good thing that we were around when COVID hit, because we were the ones that brokered the opening of the National Western Center,” Carlson says, referring to when that facility was used as a 600-person shelter. “The Denver Rescue Mission said they would run it. CCH said they would do the medical piece. It was really the most grassroots effort for collaboration.”
In the year ahead, the HLC will add representatives from Urban Alchemy, the California-based nonprofit tapped to run the largest and most controversial AIMH shelter, the Aspen. It will also bring in Bayaud Works, the company (and former nonprofit) that’s taking over operations at the Tamarac Family Shelter; Bayaud Works has been running the Stay Inn micro-community since 2023.
“We’re bringing new providers into Denver,” Carlson says. “It’s going to be really important for us to learn from what they’re doing. They’re doing stuff in other parts of the country, so I’m sure we have a lot to learn.”
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